After decades of work in antipoverty and social justice projects, artist Nell Hillsley is selling a lifetime of her paintings for peace.
By Kay Miller, Star Tribune
Fences permeate Nell Hillsley's painted landscapes. They are symbolic of the barriers we encounter in life that "keep us from the deep verdant places in our souls," Hillsley says. But she always paints a gap in the fence, a place where hope can break through.
Hillsley has spent a lifetime painting landscapes, flowers, portraits, nudes and abstracts. Now she's selling more than 125 of her works and donating the proceeds to one of those breakthrough places: the Nonviolent Peaceforce.
The Peaceforce is an international nonprofit agency founded in 2002 to send trained peacekeepers into areas of armed conflict. It is based in a house next to St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral at 519 Oak Grove St., Minneapolis. Hillsley hopes to raise $30,000, enough to support a peace worker for a year.
For nearly 30 years, Hillsley has been involved with projects serving antipoverty and justice initiatives: the alternative Center School for Indian youths, a work-readiness program for low-income single mothers, feeding programs and homeless shelters. Five years ago she created the "Children's Faces" project, in which 3,000 life-sized drawings of youngsters' faces, representing Twin Cities homeless children, were displayed at St. Mark's and at the State Capitol.
"I haven't worked with peace groups before," Hillsley said. "But I'm nearly 80 years old. You know, you only have so many years to do what is important. I think I'd like to work for peace the rest of my life."
Tall and white-haired, Hillsley cuts a striking figure. She has a bum knee, two hearing aids and less energy than she once had, but is grateful that she still can paint. "Nell radiates joy and wants that joy shared by everyone," says Tinka Kurth, a friend and Peaceforce volunteer.
Hillsley married last fall. Before she and her second husband, Van Lawrence, moved into their Cedar Lake home, she gave away piles of art and belongings that overfilled her apartment. But there was still so much left. Then she saw a TV interview in which billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates talked about pooling their vast wealth to attack global disease and hunger.
"They seemed to be having so much fun," Hillsley says. She offered Peaceforce founder Mel Duncan the benefit art sale. Since then, an army of friends, artists, church members and Peaceforce volunteers have joined forces to create the "Art for Peace" show.
"Her positive attitude about life that comes from a deep spiritual root will blow you away and make you think you can do everything, too," Kurth said. "Nell would never become discouraged about a problem being too big to solve. She just dives in."
An artist is born
While growing up in Columbia, S.C., Hillsley says, she was surrounded by love and the deep faith of her parents and grandparents. Her mother realized that she was an artist when, as a very little girl, she announced that every number and letter had its own inherent color: A's were red, B's were blue, C's were yellow.
When she was 6, her grandfather cranked up his Model T and took Hillsley to see an artist friend who was painting a child's portrait. In the shadows of the girl's face, Hillsley saw greens and lavender. "That absolutely blew my mind. It was the first time I had seen a live painting," she said. She went home and with her box of watercolors painted her first portrait.
Once, while riding the bus home from art class, Hillsley, then 11, noticed 10 exhausted black maids standing at the back of the bus. With a child's horror she realized that she and the driver, the only whites aboard, were seated alone at the front. Years later she wrote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to applaud his bus boycott, telling him about her own formative experience. She received a personal letter back from King.
That early coupling of art and empathy for the disenfranchised became a motif in Hillsley's life. Symbols of struggle and faith recur in her work. Although she painted all the time, she didn't consider herself an artist until she was 53 and moved to Vienna with her executive husband, Jack Hillsley, when Control Data transferred him there. Nell took along piles of canvases, brushes and paint.
Every day, she painted. And every afternoon, her 80-something neighbor, Elizabeth Glanville, came upstairs to inspect what Hillsley had done. Glanville was from a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish family that knew, loved and owned fine art. One night Glanville dreamed that the best gallery in Vienna wanted all of Hillsley's work.
"On the strength of Elizabeth 's dream I went to a gallery on Kaertner Strasse [ Vienna 's elegant promenade] that I thought might take my work," Hillsley said. After seeing her semi-abstract Vienna paintings, the gallery owner offered her a one-woman show that netted Hillsley $10,000. Other shows in Austria and Switzerland followed. By 1980, when her family returned to St. Paul , Hillsley knew she was an artist.
Now art fills her home, revealing eras of her life and loves. "I love color. I am seduced by color," she says. Her shirt is periwinkle, her sofa a deep rose, the living rooms walls deep yellow. There are coral abstracts of Rome and memory paintings of New York . Hillsley owns a house on Wisconsin 's Madeline Island , where every year she plants a huge flower garden, then paints it -- "like Monet," she says.
If Hillsley's show raises even $10,000, that would help send a four-person emergency team to Guatemala to provide protection for human rights workers who are under death threats, Duncan said.
Canaries in the coal mines
"Art and peacemaking are closely aligned," Duncan said. "While artists play a role in bringing us beauty, they also serve as the canaries in the coal mines to sense and portray the danger that we face."
In her nearly 80 years, Hillsley has learned much about what one committed person can do. She recalls her embarrassment decades ago when a White Bear Lake newspaper wrote about her first show under the headline: "Nell Hillsley Paints Happy." That sounded so frivolous to Hillsley in the heyday of abstract expressionism.
Then Hillsley considered all the world's sorrow. If her art gave others joy, perhaps that was enough.
Last summer a friend told Hillsley about seeing one of her flower paintings in a St. Paul art gallery window years before. The woman's husband was leaving her for a younger woman. She was devastated and didn't have much money. But she went in and bought the painting. It became her own break in the fence. Hillsley glows with the recollection.
"I thought, 'Boy, if I can do that for somebody it's worth painting flowers. If I paint happy, it's OK with me.' "
(Published at Star Tribune, Issue: Monday, April 16, 2007.)